Tuesday, March 30, 2010

There are a number of factors that influence how well we do in school, including the amount of time we study and our interest in a subject. Now, according to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, how quickly we expect to receive our grades may also influence how we perform.

Psychological scientists Keri L. Kettle and Gerald Häubl of the University of Alberta in Canada wanted to investigate how the timing of expected feedback impacts individuals' performance. For this experiment, they recruited students enrolled in a class that required each student to give a 4-minute oral presentation. The presentations were rated by classmates on a scale from 0 (poor) to 10 (excellent) and the average of these ratings formed the presenter's grade for that part of the course. Students received an email 1 day, 8 days, or 15 days before their presentation and were invited to participate in this research study. Students agreeing to volunteer in the study were informed when they would receive feedback on their presentation and were asked to predict their grades. Participating students were randomly assigned to a specific amount of anticipated feedback delay, which ranged from 0 (same day) to 17 days.

The results reveal a very interesting relationship between how soon the students expected to receive their grades and their performance: Students who were told they would receive feedback quickly on their performance earned higher grades than students who expected feedback at a later time. Furthermore, when students expected to receive their grades quickly, they predicted that their performance would be worse than students who were to receive feedback later. This pattern suggests that anticipating rapid feedback may improve performance because the threat of disappointment is more prominent. As the authors note, "People do best precisely when their predictions about their own performance are least optimistic."

Although this experiment took place in a classroom, the authors conclude that these findings "have important practical implications for all individuals who are responsible for mentoring and for evaluating the performance of others."

Monday, March 29, 2010

*Under the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, states are required to assess students in reading and math and to identify them as below proficient or as proficient or advanced (both considered passing). Because schools are held accountable only for ensuring that students test proficient or better, there have been concerns that a focus on increasing the percentage of students testing proficient might unintentionally lead to fewer students testing at the advanced level. This report, "The Relationship Between Changes in the Percentage of Students Passing and in the Percentage Testing Advanced on State Assessment Tests for Kentucky and Virginia," finds that schools in Kentucky and Virginia with the greatest increases in the percentage testing proficient or better also have the greatest increases in the percentage testing advance.*

Thursday, March 25, 2010

"Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings for Two Student Cohorts" randomly assigned teachers to either receive training and materials to incorporate commercial computer software into their curriculum or to continue using their regular curriculum.

In classrooms assigned to use PLATO®Focus or Cognitive Tutor®, the assigned curriculum was used instead of the core curriculum. In classrooms assigned to use any of the other products, the assigned curriculum was used to supplement the core curriculum.

The study found a positive, statistically significant effect for one of the six reading products examined (LeapTrack®, 4th grade). The estimated effect size was 0.09, equivalent to moving a student from the 50th to the 54th percentile of reading achievement.

None of the four math products examined demonstrated significant effects on student achievement.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

*The best way to help teenagers who are struggling in school is put aside their academic problems and focus on what they’re doing right, according to a family research scientist who has put this theory to practice.

Nearly every family with a teen who has problems in school is told what they’re doing wrong. But knowing what’s wrong won’t fix anything, said Stephen Gavazzi, professor of education and human ecology at Ohio State University.

Gavazzi describes his strength-based approach in a new book "Strong Families, Successful Students: Helping Teenagers Reach Their Full Academic Potential" (BookSurge).

In the book, Gavazzi lists traits that strong families have in common and then shows how they can be used to help teenagers in school, and in other parts of their lives as well.

Gavazzi’s prescription for helping teens is based on a program he helped developed in the 1990s called “Growing Up FAST.” This family-strengthening program was originally designed to help families of all youth, but evolved into a delinquency prevention program for youth and their families.

Growing Up FAST was very successful. Studies showed that about three times fewer youth who went through the program committed new crimes in the next nine months when compared to those teens who didn’t take part (18 percent of participating youth versus 60 percent of others).

Gavazzi said he wrote this book because he believes the same principles that worked to help troubled youth can be applied to any family.

“There’s a firm research basis for this, and thousands of families have already gone through this program. The studies say that this program works for families,” he said. The research that underlies the Strong Families book will be published separately, this fall, in the book "Families With Adolescents: Theory, Research and Prevention and Intervention Applications" (Springer).

The focus in Strong Families is helping to boost academics, because doing well in school is the main duty of teenagers in our society, Gavazzi explained. But helping teens in school should also be beneficial in all parts of their lives.

Gavazzi said the book is based on the principle that the family is a system, of which the teenager is just one part.

“There isn’t just a teenager who is having problems in school – there is a family where some things aren’t working well. A teenager’s school problems are just part of a larger constellation of factors. There is shared responsibility,” Gavazzi said.

But in helping families, Gavazzi said the key is not to focus on the problems, at least at first. He encourages families to “park” their problems – not ignore them, or pretend they are not there, but set them aside while they build on strengths.

“We have to get away from the shame and blame focus. We’re empowering families, helping them to remember that there are some good things that they can build on.”

Some people may think this approach is Pollyannaish, and ignores the real problems families face, Gavazzi said. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all, the strength-based approach is not easy. It is often harder to stay focused on strengths than it is to lapse into shame and blame.

More importantly, Gavazzi said a strength-based approach is often the only way to reach teenagers.

“As soon as teenagers hear you say something negative about them, the light switch goes off. They are not going to hear anything else you have to say and you’re not going to reach them,” Gavazzi said.

That’s the reason Gavazzi focuses on what he calls the five facts about strong families: they have a shared positive identity about themselves; they understand their members’ talents and abilities; they are patient and kind; they are able to find and use resources; and they can work together.

In the book, Gavazzi devotes a chapter to each strength, using each as a step towards achieving the goal of having a successful student. Each chapter has an exercise for the family to do together to build on that strength.

The exercises involve agreeing on definitions of success, identifying what both teens and parents are already doing that qualifies as success, and then exploring what small things parents and teens can do to improve on those successes.

“Your strengths become your vehicle for solving problems,” Gavazzi said. “If you start building on strengths, you start to get clues as to how to solve your problems.”

The exercises are a vital part of the book, Gavazzi said.

“I don’t want parents to read the book and just be filled with good ideas. The exercises make the ideas come alive and actually help families, and that’s the whole point,” he said.

One of the key lessons of the book, Gavazzi said, is that families are the real experts at what works for them and what doesn’t.

"Educationally relevant health disparities" are key drivers of the achievement gap, "but they are largely overlooked," said Charles Basch, the Richard March Hoe Professor of Health Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

"Over the past several decades, a variety of strategies have been tried to help close the achievement gap – standards, accountability, NCLB, more rigorous teacher certification – and they're all important, but they won't have the desired effect unless students are ready and motivated to learn."

At the College's Cowin Conference Center on March 9, Basch presented his findings and then discussed them with respondents Matthew Yale, Deputy Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; and TC alumnus Howell Wechsler, Director of the Division of Adolescent School Health (DASH) for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The event, presented by TC's Campaign for Educational Equity, was moderated by Jane Quinn, Assistant Executive Director for Community Schools for the Children's Aid Society.

Basch, whose study pulls together research from over 300 sources, called the health crisis for the nation's youth "staggering." Among the statistics he cited:

• Visual problems affect more than 20 percent of American youth• Asthma affects more than 14 percent of youth under 18• One in three teens is expected to become pregnant• Twenty-eight percent of adolescents have been bullied at school• Two in three students don't get enough physical activity• 20 percent of youth skip breakfast on any given day.• About 8 percent of youth ages 6-17 have been diagnosed with hyperactivity

And, Basch said, the situation is far worse for urban minority youth. Among the examples he gave:

• Black children are significantly more likely to suffer from asthma, and certain populations within Latinos – most notably Puerto Ricans – are as well. Urban minority youth also have higher rates of poorly controlled asthma, as indicated by over-use of the emergency room and under-use of efficacious medicines.

• Non-Hispanic black teens have pregnancy rates three times as high as whites, and rates for Hispanic teens are four times as high as for whites.

• Nearly 10 percent of Hispanic youths missed one or more day of school in the past month because they were afraid – a figure more than twice as high as for whites. Rates for blacks were more than 50 percent higher than for whites.

"All of this is old news," Basch said. What's new, he said, is research on how these conditions work together to impair educational outcomes. The combined effect of the seven is synergistic, he said, creating a crisis that is more than the sum of its parts.

So what must happen to change that picture?

"The most important thing is not do just one thing," Basch said. "Instead, we must address a set of priorities simultaneously."

The country needs a national school health strategic plan, Basch said. Yet because education in America is so decentralized, planning must also go on at the local level. Health related measures must be integrated into school accountability mechanisms, and health goals must become part of individual school improvement plans.*

The Nation's Report Card presents results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 4th and 8th graders in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Department of Defense Schools, and the nation as a whole. Significant results for reading in 2009 include:

* The average score for students at grade 4 showed no overall increase at the national level, although scores were significantly higher in 2009 than when the assessment began in 1992.

* Overall in 2009, 67 percent of students at grade 4 performed at or above Basic and 33 percent performed at or above Proficient; these percentages were unchanged from 2007, but were higher than previous assessment years.

* The average score for grade 8 in 2009 was higher when compared to both 2007 and 1992. The percentages of students at grade 8 performing at or above Basic and at or above Proficient (75 and 32, respectively) were also higher in 2009 than in both 2007 and 1992.

* Since 2007, scores have increased for lower- and middle-performing eighth-graders (10th, 25th, and 50th percentiles); there was no change for higher-performing students at grade 8.

* Since 1992, the White-Black gap has narrowed at grade 4 and the female-male gap has narrowed at grade 8. There were no changes in the racial/ethnic or gender gaps since 2007.

* Between 2007 and 2009, one state made gains at both grades 4 and 8; two states increased at grade 4 only, and eight increased at grade 8 only. Scores declined in four states at grade 4; no states had a decrease in scores at grade 8.*

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Fordham Institute's expert reviewers have analyzed the draft Common Core K-12 education standards (made public on March 10) according to rigorous criteria. Their analyses lead to a grade of A- for the draft mathematics standards and B for those in English language arts. The analysis can be found here.

From the review:

On the math side, our reviewers found clear, rigorous standards that set forth mostof the essential content that students in grades K-12 must master. While sometweaks are needed—particularly at the high-school level—this draft “embodiesinternationally-competitive expectations for students in mathematics” and earns animpressive A-.1

On the English language arts (ELA) side, the standards are also strong, though inneed of a few more adjustments. While NGA and CCSSO have made clear fromthe outset that these expectations would concentrate on the reading, writing, speaking,and listening skills that students should master to be ready to succeed in collegeand the workforce, the standards-drafters have also woven in clear recommendationsabout the level of reading that young people should be doing, the sorts offiction and non-fiction books they ought to read, and some of the essential contentthey’ll need to master to attain these skills. As written, the standards earn a solid B.

With some clarification of vague spots and the addition of more specific referencesto essential content, these standards will be top-notch expectations that help pushthe rigor of reading (and writing, etc.) instruction across the country.

*This First Look reportpresents data from a recent district Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) survey about alternative schools and programs available to students during the 2007-08 school year. Alternative schools and programs are specifically designed to address the educational needs of students at risk of school failure in a setting apart from that of the regular public school. They can be administered by the district or an entity other than the district. The study includes information on the availability and number of alternative schools and programs, the number of students enrolled in alternative schools and program, and district policy on returning students to a regular school. Findings include:

* In the 2007–08 school year, 64 percent of districts reported having at least one alternative school or program for at-risk students that was administered either by the district or by another entity. Forty percent of districts reported having at least one district-administered alternative school or program, and 35 percent of districts reported using at least one alternative school or program administered by another entity in the 2007–08 school year.

* There were 646,500 students enrolled in public school districts attending alternative schools and programs for at-risk students in 2007–08, with 558,300 students attending district-administered alternative schools and programs and 87,200 students attending alternative schools and programs administered by another entity.

* Sixty-three percent of the districts reported having a policy that allowed all students enrolled in alternative schools or programs to return to regular school, and 36 percent of the districts reported having a policy that allowed some of the students to return to a regular school. Among the factors these districts reported as very important in determining whether a student was able to return were: improved attitude/behavior (78 percent), student motivation (77 percent), approval of alternative school or program staff (60 percent), and improved grades (58 percent).^

Friday, March 19, 2010

The federal government pays 90 percent of the bill for interstate highways, and even secessionist states such as Texas and South Carolina go along with its specifications for lane width, signage, and speed limits. Now, the Obama Administration seeks to greatly extend the reach of federal policy with an ante of just 7.5 percent or so of the annual bill for public education. The vehicle for this audacious play is the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA), formerly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

The U.S. Department of Education's (USDE) "Blueprint for Reform of Education," which it released on the Ides of March, makes the case for a dramatic rewriting of national policy, including some worthwhile and needed changes to the present law.

First, it recognizes the hash that NCLB made of curricular standards and standardized testing. Essentially, most states set weak, numerous, vague, or too specific academic standards and then gamed the state tests to deceive the public about how well students were performing. USDE now proposes that states agree on a new set of clear, strong, and relatively fewer standards, followed by cooperatively developed assessments that go beyond multiple choice.

Second, the Blueprint replaces NCLB's ludicrous mandate of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 with a more complex system that emphasizes steady and significant progress by students, schools, and districts. It maintains the important attention to how specific subgroups of students perform, with consequences for those districts and schools where the achievement gap persists for poor, minority, or English-learning students.

Third, as it did last year in the stimulus legislation, USDE requires that every state develop a data system that follows each student from preschool to graduation. A few states such as Texas and Florida can now generate very useful analyses of how well free-lunch eligible, Latino fourth graders, for example, are doing on English in every classroom, school, and district in the state. All states need to get to the point of being able to track, analyze, report, and evaluate student achievement.

Fourth, USDE deserves credit for recognizing in the Blueprint the broken system for preparing, recruiting, supporting, retaining, and promoting more effective teachers and principals, even if some of its recommendations are impractical and unfair.

Finally, the Blueprint gives special emphasis to English learners, the disabled, migrant students, and students in rural districts. This may read like a pretty good start on rewriting the centerpiece of federal education policy. Actually, there are five very serious problems with the Blueprint that Congress needs to correct before enacting ESEA

1. The Blueprint ignores the widely accepted evidence of what works best to close the achievement gap: concentrating on making young students from poor families strong readers. For almost two decades we have known that poor kids start kindergarten about eighteen months behind their middle-class peers in vocabulary, general knowledge, familiarity with stories and books, and knowing their letters. If this gap is not narrowed, then the poor students have a much-reduced chance of becoming confident readers by third grade, which is a powerful indicator of whether they will finish high school.

ESEA should be revised to concentrate more federal dollars on increasing the number of poor children who attend high-quality preschools and "graduate" into primary schools that emphasize intensive early literacy. No such encouragement is offered. USDE could have highlighted the dramatic gains made by the 35,000+ Title I students in the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, where federal funds have greatly expanded pre-kindergarten opportunities for poor students.

2. The Blueprint ignores the consequences of deep poverty on instructional performance and improvement. Again, the evidence about the disparities between poor and middle-class students is plenteous, overwhelming, and uncontested. But concentrated poverty is the killer of educational achievement. This fact should be central to the USDE's focus on the bottom 10 percent of schools and its almost flippant mandate that states and districts turn these schools around.

My analysis of New Jersey's bottom-performing schools reveals-not surprisingly-that almost all of them are in the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest cities. Camden, one of the nation's three poorest cities, "contributed" fourteen of its nineteen elementary schools to the list of those scoring in the bottom 10 percent of the state's third grade literacy test in 2008. Fifteen of Newark's forty-nine schools were on the same list, almost all of them from the city's poorest Central and South Wards. In these cities, the student mobility and free-lunch rates tend to be higher in the lowest-performing schools. In Newark, the student mobility rate in the so-called 10 percent schools averages 25 percent.

USDE displays undeserved certainty that these pedagogically challenging problems can be corrected by mandating that districts exercise one of four governance options in the bottom 10 percent schools: close them down, reconstitute the leadership and faculty, contract with an educational or charter management organization, or "transform" them by supporting teachers with lots of training, instructional materials, evidence, and classroom support. There is no convincing evidence that any of these models have been effective in enough cases to mandate their use.

3. The Blueprint is based on an assumption that cleaning up standards and assessments is a quick, relatively smooth process that can be the anchor of a reauthorized ESEA. Wrong.

Normally, ESEA is authorized for a five-year period. USDE must believe that with unprecedented speed, the following can be accomplished by the fractious, complex, diverse, and tradition-bound public education establishment:

- by 2011, almost all states will have adopted whatever standards emerge from the process being managed by the National Governor's Association and Council of Chief State School Officers;

- then, within a relatively short time, schools, districts, and each state will have identified, purchased, and introduced the new textbooks, instructional materials, and software required to teach the new standards;

- furthermore, the schools and districts quickly will assess the capacity of their faculties to teach the new standards using the new materials and will be able to organize and implement supplementary training to those teachers who are under-prepared for the more rigorous content in short order; and,

- finally, by, say, the third year, there will be new assessments in place that will have been designed, field tested, corrected, re-tested, and then adopted for use as measures of accountability in math and English for at least seven grade levels.

This schedule could be abbreviated if USDE and the other forty-nine states agreed quickly that Massachusetts or, perhaps Minnesota, has reasonably clear, strong, internationally aligned academic standards in place, and that its assessments provide the accountability and instructional information required. This would short-cut the process dramatically and make the standards and assessments criteria of the Blueprint achievable. The odds of this happening are very long.

One should anticipate that the first consequence of more rigorous academic standards actually will be a widening of the achievement gap, as the pace of introducing new content and skills in poor schools will lag the assessment of them in new, tougher assessments.

4. The Blueprint continues the fiction that individual schools, even those at the very bottom, can adapt to new standards and assessments without the leadership of the state and their districts.

Let's use Newark as an example again. Fifteen of its forty-nine elementary schools would be designated "Challenge" schools under the proposed revision, which means that they are subject to one of the four mandated governance treatments. Only seven or eight of these can be "transformed" with a district-led program of substantial teacher support and training; the balance would be closed or turned over to new leadership that would operate with autonomy. But it turns out that ten of the forty-nine would be designated "Reward" schools because they have done a superb job in closing the achievement gap. Like the Challenge schools, Reward schools are to be granted extraordinary autonomy, which, one assumes includes issues of curriculum, instructional materials, faculty training, and support.

So, as many as half of Newark's school may operate pretty much on their own in responding to a new set of academic standards and assessments. This is precisely where Newark (and twenty-nine other New Jersey districts) found itself in 1998, when the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered each of its elementary schools to select one of ten approved "comprehensive school reform" models for adoption within a three-year period. The result was chaos, as the schools selected eight different models in a district where about one in five students moves to another school annually. Moreover, the models that were adopted did not deliver on the results promised by their promoters in testimony to the court, with the result that academic performance declined in many schools and did not improve overall.

The only sensible way to adapt to sweeping changes in academic expectations is to focus the responsibility on the district central office. Otherwise, there will be no coherence in preparing teachers and students for the new curriculum. Given this mandate, central offices will normally reach out to the practitioners who are producing the best results to participate in the daunting task of determining how to teach to the new standards. That is certainly the case in districts such as Montgomery County (Maryland) and Union City (New Jersey) that have narrowed substantially the achievement gap.

5. The USDE has greatly overestimated the capacity of state departments of education to reform the systems they have created.

In the past decade or so, the number of professional employees working in state education departments has declined rather noticeably (New Jersey has lost about 40 percent of its workers in the past ten years, while its responsibilities have been enlarged). A richer percentage of professionals, therefore, are paid to implement federal programs such as Title I, special education, Safe and Drug-free Schools, and so on. Most departments are well-schooled in writing regulations and developing paperwork systems to determine compliance. These rules are dominated by the verbs "must" and "shall." These are not the verbs that are used to describe effective educational practices. Instead, "might," "try," "adjust," and "re-adjust" work better.

Under the Blueprint, there is an assumption that state education departments know how to repair broken schools. But history shows that there have been enough starts and re-starts with grand-sounding acronyms launched by states to finally, once and for all, "reform" public education. Add the Blueprint to the list. However, the notion that state department professionals are deep in the mud concerning fixing broken schools will come as a surprise to most commissioners and public educators.

From time to time, there are exceptions to this characterization of state educators and what they do. But rule-making and enforcement dominate, and these are two activities inconsistent with the practice of effective education in districts with concentrations of students from poor families.

The hope for a stronger, more effective federal policy rests in the hands of Congress, particularly in the leadership of the House and Senate committees who have pledged a bipartisan and cooperative approach to the Obama administration.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

*The U.S. Department of Education's "Blueprint for Reform of Education" makes the case for a dramatic rewriting of national policy. In a new issue brief from The Century Foundation, Gordon MacInnes concludes that the Blueprint features some worthwhile and needed changes to the current law, but that it contains some serious problems that Congress should correct before it reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA), formerly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In "ESEA Reauthorization: The Feds Leverage Their 7.5 Percent" (the entire brief can also be found at the end of this summary) MacInnes, a fellow at The Century Foundation, supports the U.S. Department of Education's (USDE) efforts to redress some of the most notable problems with NCLB. They include:

- A proposal that states agree on a new set of clear, strong, and relatively fewer standards, followed by cooperatively developed assessments that go beyond multiple choice;

- Replacing the mandate of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 with a more complex system that emphasizes steady and significant progress by students, schools, and districts;

- A requirement that every state develop a date system that follows each student from preschool to graduation; and

- Recognition of the broken system for preparing, recruiting, supporting, retaining, and promoting more effective teachers.

However, MacInnes focuses on what he considers five serious problems with the Blueprint:

- The Blueprint ignores the widely accepted evidence that concentrating on making young students from poor families strong readers works best in closing the achievement gap

- The Blueprint ignores the consequences of deep poverty on instructional performance and improvement

- The Blueprint is based on an assumption that cleaning up standards and assessments is a quick, relatively smooth process that can be the anchor of a reauthorized ESEA

- The Blueprint continues the fiction that individual schools, even those at the very bottom, can adapt to new standards and assessments without the leadership of the state and their districts

- The USDE has greatly overestimated the capacity of state departments of education to reform the systems they have created

- - - -

ESEA Reauthorization: The Feds Leverage Their 7.5 Percent

By Gordon A. MacInnes

A CENTURY FOUNDATION ISSUE BRIEF

The federal government pays 90 percent of the bill for interstate highways, and even secessionist states such as Texas and South Carolina go along with its specifications for lane width, signage, and speed limits. Now, the Obama Administration seeks to greatly extend the reach of federal policy with an ante of just 7.5 percent or so of the annual bill for public education. The vehicle for this audacious play is the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA), formerly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

The U.S. Department of Education's (USDE) "Blueprint for Reform of Education," which it released on the Ides of March, makes the case for a dramatic rewriting of national policy, including some worthwhile and needed changes to the present law.

First, it recognizes the hash that NCLB made of curricular standards and standardized testing. Essentially, most states set weak, numerous, vague, or too specific academic standards and then gamed the state tests to deceive the public about how well students were performing. USDE now proposes that states agree on a new set of clear, strong, and relatively fewer standards, followed by cooperatively developed assessments that go beyond multiple choice.

Second, the Blueprint replaces NCLB's ludicrous mandate of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 with a more complex system that emphasizes steady and significant progress by students, schools, and districts. It maintains the important attention to how specific subgroups of students perform, with consequences for those districts and schools where the achievement gap persists for poor, minority, or English-learning students.

Third, as it did last year in the stimulus legislation, USDE requires that every state develop a data system that follows each student from preschool to graduation. A few states such as Texas and Florida can now generate very useful analyses of how well free-lunch eligible, Latino fourth graders, for example, are doing on English in every classroom, school, and district in the state. All states need to get to the point of being able to track, analyze, report, and evaluate student achievement.

Fourth, USDE deserves credit for recognizing in the Blueprint the broken system for preparing, recruiting, supporting, retaining, and promoting more effective teachers and principals, even if some of its recommendations are impractical and unfair.

Finally, the Blueprint gives special emphasis to English learners, the disabled, migrant students, and students in rural districts. This may read like a pretty good start on rewriting the centerpiece of federal education policy. Actually, there are five very serious problems with the Blueprint that Congress needs to correct before enacting ESEA

1. The Blueprint ignores the widely accepted evidence of what works best to close the achievement gap: concentrating on making young students from poor families strong readers. For almost two decades we have known that poor kids start kindergarten about eighteen months behind their middle-class peers in vocabulary, general knowledge, familiarity with stories and books, and knowing their letters. If this gap is not narrowed, then the poor students have a much-reduced chance of becoming confident readers by third grade, which is a powerful indicator of whether they will finish high school.

ESEA should be revised to concentrate more federal dollars on increasing the number of poor children who attend high-quality preschools and "graduate" into primary schools that emphasize intensive early literacy. No such encouragement is offered. USDE could have highlighted the dramatic gains made by the 35,000+ Title I students in the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools, where federal funds have greatly expanded pre-kindergarten opportunities for poor students.

2. The Blueprint ignores the consequences of deep poverty on instructional performance and improvement. Again, the evidence about the disparities between poor and middle-class students is plenteous, overwhelming, and uncontested. But concentrated poverty is the killer of educational achievement. This fact should be central to the USDE's focus on the bottom 10 percent of schools and its almost flippant mandate that states and districts turn these schools around.

My analysis of New Jersey's bottom-performing schools reveals-not surprisingly-that almost all of them are in the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest cities. Camden, one of the nation's three poorest cities, "contributed" fourteen of its nineteen elementary schools to the list of those scoring in the bottom 10 percent of the state's third grade literacy test in 2008. Fifteen of Newark's forty-nine schools were on the same list, almost all of them from the city's poorest Central and South Wards. In these cities, the student mobility and free-lunch rates tend to be higher in the lowest-performing schools. In Newark, the student mobility rate in the so-called 10 percent schools averages 25 percent.

USDE displays undeserved certainty that these pedagogically challenging problems can be corrected by mandating that districts exercise one of four governance options in the bottom 10 percent schools: close them down, reconstitute the leadership and faculty, contract with an educational or charter management organization, or "transform" them by supporting teachers with lots of training, instructional materials, evidence, and classroom support. There is no convincing evidence that any of these models have been effective in enough cases to mandate their use.

3. The Blueprint is based on an assumption that cleaning up standards and assessments is a quick, relatively smooth process that can be the anchor of a reauthorized ESEA. Wrong.

Normally, ESEA is authorized for a five-year period. USDE must believe that with unprecedented speed, the following can be accomplished by the fractious, complex, diverse, and tradition-bound public education establishment:

- by 2011, almost all states will have adopted whatever standards emerge from the process being managed by the National Governor's Association and Council of Chief State School Officers;

- then, within a relatively short time, schools, districts, and each state will have identified, purchased, and introduced the new textbooks, instructional materials, and software required to teach the new standards;

- furthermore, the schools and districts quickly will assess the capacity of their faculties to teach the new standards using the new materials and will be able to organize and implement supplementary training to those teachers who are under-prepared for the more rigorous content in short order; and,

- finally, by, say, the third year, there will be new assessments in place that will have been designed, field tested, corrected, re-tested, and then adopted for use as measures of accountability in math and English for at least seven grade levels.

This schedule could be abbreviated if USDE and the other forty-nine states agreed quickly that Massachusetts or, perhaps Minnesota, has reasonably clear, strong, internationally aligned academic standards in place, and that its assessments provide the accountability and instructional information required. This would short-cut the process dramatically and make the standards and assessments criteria of the Blueprint achievable. The odds of this happening are very long.

One should anticipate that the first consequence of more rigorous academic standards actually will be a widening of the achievement gap, as the pace of introducing new content and skills in poor schools will lag the assessment of them in new, tougher assessments.

4. The Blueprint continues the fiction that individual schools, even those at the very bottom, can adapt to new standards and assessments without the leadership of the state and their districts.

Let's use Newark as an example again. Fifteen of its forty-nine elementary schools would be designated "Challenge" schools under the proposed revision, which means that they are subject to one of the four mandated governance treatments. Only seven or eight of these can be "transformed" with a district-led program of substantial teacher support and training; the balance would be closed or turned over to new leadership that would operate with autonomy. But it turns out that ten of the forty-nine would be designated "Reward" schools because they have done a superb job in closing the achievement gap. Like the Challenge schools, Reward schools are to be granted extraordinary autonomy, which, one assumes includes issues of curriculum, instructional materials, faculty training, and support.

So, as many as half of Newark's school may operate pretty much on their own in responding to a new set of academic standards and assessments. This is precisely where Newark (and twenty-nine other New Jersey districts) found itself in 1998, when the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered each of its elementary schools to select one of ten approved "comprehensive school reform" models for adoption within a three-year period. The result was chaos, as the schools selected eight different models in a district where about one in five students moves to another school annually. Moreover, the models that were adopted did not deliver on the results promised by their promoters in testimony to the court, with the result that academic performance declined in many schools and did not improve overall.

The only sensible way to adapt to sweeping changes in academic expectations is to focus the responsibility on the district central office. Otherwise, there will be no coherence in preparing teachers and students for the new curriculum. Given this mandate, central offices will normally reach out to the practitioners who are producing the best results to participate in the daunting task of determining how to teach to the new standards. That is certainly the case in districts such as Montgomery County (Maryland) and Union City (New Jersey) that have narrowed substantially the achievement gap.

5. The USDE has greatly overestimated the capacity of state departments of education to reform the systems they have created.

In the past decade or so, the number of professional employees working in state education departments has declined rather noticeably (New Jersey has lost about 40 percent of its workers in the past ten years, while its responsibilities have been enlarged). A richer percentage of professionals, therefore, are paid to implement federal programs such as Title I, special education, Safe and Drug-free Schools, and so on. Most departments are well-schooled in writing regulations and developing paperwork systems to determine compliance. These rules are dominated by the verbs "must" and "shall." These are not the verbs that are used to describe effective educational practices. Instead, "might," "try," "adjust," and "re-adjust" work better.

Under the Blueprint, there is an assumption that state education departments know how to repair broken schools. But history shows that there have been enough starts and re-starts with grand-sounding acronyms launched by states to finally, once and for all, "reform" public education. Add the Blueprint to the list. However, the notion that state department professionals are deep in the mud concerning fixing broken schools will come as a surprise to most commissioners and public educators.

From time to time, there are exceptions to this characterization of state educators and what they do. But rule-making and enforcement dominate, and these are two activities inconsistent with the practice of effective education in districts with concentrations of students from poor families.

The hope for a stronger, more effective federal policy rests in the hands of Congress, particularly in the leadership of the House and Senate committees who have pledged a bipartisan and cooperative approach to the Obama administration.*

*A new independent national study of 100 high-utilizing PD 360 schools shows dramatic and statistically significant improvement in student achievement in both math and reading. In this study only schools that reported a high use of PD 360 were analyzed. When comparing these schools to their collective district benchmark from the prior year, students showed 72% greater improvement in reading (p

Results broken out by elementary, middle and high school levels also confirm this strong and statistically significant growth in student achievement in schools with a high use of PD 360. Elementary schools results increased by 235% for Math and 74% for reading in the schools with high use of PD 360 compared to benchmark schools. In middle schools increases were 298% for math and 72% for reading. In high schools increases were 749% for math and 56% for reading (p"Statistically, the data clearly validates the impact of PD 360 on student performance and teacher efficacy. It seems appropriate that any school seeking to experience statistically significant gains would strongly consider these compelling data reflecting such a rigorous methodology,” said Dr. Steven H. Shaha, PhD, D.B.A. Dr. Shaha holds two masters’ degrees and a doctorate in Research Methods and Applied Statistics and in Business Administration, and has over 25 years of experience in organizational performance and data analysis. The author of two books and over 100 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Shaha has worked with national, State, international and local education departments, as well as with over 200 organizations in the private sector.

Over 500,000 educators at over 12,000 schools in every state, and nearly all territories, and Canadian provinces use PD 360 to access hundreds of short, easy-to-use video segments that feature the leading experts and present real classroom, best-practice examples. Teachers and administrators are impressed by both the quality and content of PD 360’s library. In addition to its vast content library, PD 360 provides integrated follow-up tools, reflection activities, tracking, and collaboration and community discussion forums and file sharing to promote greater implementation of learning.

“This study validates the results we found with our initial research study on the impact of PD 360 on achievement,” said Chet Linton, CEO, School Improvement Network. “Educators should be especially excited with the large gains seen in students’ math scores. Our nation definitely is looking for better results in math, and schools that consistently use PD 360 obtain great math results. This data speaks to the tremendous growth in both confidence and teaching effectiveness that PD 360 gives teachers.”

The results of this study verify that schools and systems can confidently invest in PD 360 as a form of professional learning proven to increase student achievement. Additional research is currently underway to further investigate the effectiveness of PD 360, and several more reports will be released in the coming months as data becomes available.

About PD 360

PD 360 is the leading on-demand professional learning resource for educators with over 500,000 subscribers. Teachers, administrators, professional learning communities, coaches, etc., have access to over 1000 indexed and searchable video segments that present real, best-practice classroom examples. Each segment includes content from respected educational experts such as Michael Fullan, Rick DuFour, Doug Reeves, Rick Stiggins, and many others. PD 360 can be used to create a structured learning experience for an individual teacher, professional learning community, or entire school. It bridges the gap between training and classroom implementation with job-embedded follow-up, tracking, and reflection tools. PD 360 also gives educators access to an online community of teaching professionals that allows interaction and collaboration either within a district or across the United States and world.

*A new study from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) that analyzes state assessment data by gender finds good news for girls but troubling news for boys. According to CEP’s study, the lagging performance by boys in reading is the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools. In some states, the percentage of boys performing at proficient in reading is more than 10 percentage points below that of girls. And that trend is consistent at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, the study finds.

The story is different in math, however. At the proficient level, the number of states in which girls outperformed boys was roughly equal to the number of states in which boys outperformed girls. At the advanced level, 4th-grade boys outperformed girls in most states.

“Our analysis suggests that the gap between boys and girls in reading is a cause for concern,” said Jack Jennings, CEP’s president and CEO. “Much greater attention must be paid to giving boys the reading skills they need to succeed in early grades and throughout their education.”

Overall in reading, the CEP study finds that many states have made progress in narrowing gaps between male and female students. For example, gaps in elementary school reading have narrowed in 24 states though they have widened in 14 states. The findings in grade 4 reading also find that while both boys and girls have made progress since 2002, more girls than boys reached all three achievement levels—basic, proficient, and advanced—in 2008.

In math, there was no significant gender gap in 2008. Rather, there was rough parity in the percentage of boys and girls reaching proficiency at all three grade levels and no state had a difference in math between girls and boys of more than 10 percentage points. In grade 4 math, states tended to have greater shares of girls reaching the basic level and greater shares of boys reaching the advanced levels.

Individual state profiles allow for closer analysis of results. For example, in Indiana, girls led boys in the percentage reaching proficiency in reading at all three grade levels in 2008. The gaps between girls and boys was 9 percentage points in 4th grade, 13 percentage points in8th grade, and 10 percentage points in 11th grade. Mirroring national results, roughly equal percentages of boys and girls performed at proficient on Indiana’s math assessments in all three grades.

Looking at the results since the 2002 enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for both boys and girls at all three grade levels, more states had gains in reading and math proficiency between 2002 and 2008 than had declines. Across all states and grade spans, 84 percent of trend lines for male students showed an increase in performance on state reading tests. A similar trend was found for female performance on state math tests at 83 percent.

“Although the gaps–particularly in reading—are not nearly as large as those found between racial/ethnic and income subgroups, they are telling and have serious implications for the futures of all our students.” Jennings said. “The college attendance and completion rate for males continues to decline, and these data strongly suggest that those patterns could be altered with a greater focus on male reading skills at the earliest stages of education.”

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

*Seeing the letter A before an exam can improve a student's exam result while exposure to the letter F may make a student more likely to fail.

The finding is published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology in March 2010.

The study, carried out by Dr Keith Ciani and Dr Ken Sheldon at the University of Missouri, USA, investigated whether exposing students to the letters A or F before a test affected how they performed. Dr Ciani said: "The letters A and F have significant meaning for students, A represents success and F, failure. We hypothesised that if students are exposed to these letters prior to an academic test it could affect their performance through non-conscious motivation."

A total of 131 students took part in three separate experiments. In the first, 23 undergraduates were asked to complete a number of analogies in a classroom setting. All of the tests were the same, however half of the tests were labelled 'Test Bank ID: A', and the other half 'Test Bank ID: F'. Before starting the test the participants were asked to write their Test Bank ID letter in the top right hand corner of each sheet.

Each participant's analogy tests were scored and compared between the groups. A significant difference between the two groups was found, with the A group performing significantly better than the F group; A scoring on average 11.08 correct out of 12, and F only 9.42 correct on average.

In the second study, the experiment was repeated with 32 students, but as well as Test Bank ID: A' and 'Test Bank ID: F' groups, some of the students were given 'Test Bank ID: J' -- a letter without performance meaning. Again, participants in the A group performed significantly better on the analogy test than participants on the F group, while participants given the letter J performed better than F, but worse than A.

Dr Keith Ciani said: "These findings suggest that exposure to letters A and F, even without any explicit reference to success or failure, significantly affected the students' performance on the tests.

"We believe that the meanings inherent in the evaluative letters were enough to influence their performance through the motivational state that they produced. Exposure to the letter A made the students non-consciously approach the task with the aim to succeed, while exposure to letter F made the students non-consciously want to avoid failure. Research suggests that when people approach tasks with the desire to succeed they perform better than when striving to avoid failure.

"During the debriefing process, participants could recall their letter but were unaware of its role in the study. These findings support our hypothesis that the effect occurred outside of participants' conscious awareness."

The findings were also replicated in a third experiment in which 76 undergraduate students were asked to complete an anagram test in a laboratory setting, after being exposed to either A, F or J 'presented as Subject ID'. Participants in the condition A scored on average 6.02 correct out of 7, but F scored only 3.65 on average.

"We believe the primary implication from this research is that students are vulnerable to evaluative letters presented before a task. Teachers should be careful not to use identification systems that map onto assessment systems. For example, in a course with letter grading, teachers should avoid identifying different test forms using letters from the grading scale. Doing so may inadvertently prime students to do better or worse than their ability and preparation would predict. Conversely, this effect may be desired by savvy teachers. Adorning classrooms with symbols of achievement, such as A+ and other success-oriented words and phrases may activate effort, pride, and the intention to perform well in standardized testing situation. It is important to note that the external validity of our research remains to be demonstrated."

Monday, March 15, 2010

The Obama administration's plan to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), A Blueprint for Reform, will support state and local efforts to help ensure that all students graduate prepared for college and a career.

Following the lead of the nation's governors and state education leaders, the plan will ask states to ensure that their academic standards prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace, and to create accountability systems that recognize student growth and school progress toward meeting that goal. This will be a key priority in the reform of NCLB, which was signed into law in 2002 and is the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA).

"We will work with Congress on a bipartisan basis to reauthorize ESEA this year," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said about the blueprint, which the Obama administration released on Saturday. "We owe it to our children and our country to act now."

NCLB highlighted the achievement gap and created a national conversation about student achievement. But it also created incentives for states to lower their standards; emphasized punishing failure over rewarding success; focused on absolute scores, rather than recognizing growth and progress; and prescribed a pass-fail, one-size-fits-all series of interventions for schools that miss their goals. The administration's proposal addresses these challenges, while continuing to shine a bright light on closing the achievement gap.

"To make ESEA work, we have to fix accountability and get it right," Duncan said. "A rigorous and fair accountability system measures student growth, rewards schools that accelerate student achievement, and identifies and rewards outstanding teachers and leaders. NCLB says that fifth-grade teacher who helps a student reading at a second-grade level reach a fourth-grade level, within one year, has this missed their goal. In fact, that teacher is an excellent teacher and should be applauded."

Under the Obama administration's blueprint, state accountability systems will set a high bar of all students graduating from high school ready to succeed in college and careers. The accountability system also will recognize and reward high-poverty schools and districts that are showing improvement getting their students on this path, using measures of progress and growth.

States and districts will identify and take rigorous actions in the lowest-performing schools. The administration has proposed a significant investment to help states and districts in these efforts.

Under the ESEA blueprint, states and districts will continue to focus on the achievement gap by identifying and intervening in schools that are persistently failing to close those gaps. For other schools, states and districts would have flexibility to determine appropriate improvement and support options.

With states setting high standards we must ensure that states, districts, schools, and teachers have the support they need to help students meet these higher standards, especially in high-need schools. The blueprint asks states and districts to develop meaningful ways of measuring teacher and principal effectiveness in order to provide better support for educators, enhance the profession through recognizing and rewarding excellence, and ensure that every classroom has a great teacher and every school has a great leader.

Friday, March 12, 2010

*Resources and Educational Opportunities Perceived as Lacking in Study Commissioned in Conjunction with Annual Global Marathon By, For and About Women in Engineering and Technology

Faced with increasing competition across the globe, politicians, pundits and the private sector have sounded the alarm that a reinvigorated focus must be urgently applied to American STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math). Lacking that effort, many have predicted that America’s next generation will fall behind the economic and innovation curve, a scenario that could directly impact basic quality of life standards.

“The results of this survey could not be clearer”

Now, a new study commissioned in conjunction with the annual Global Marathon By For and About Women in Engineering and Technology sheds an important light on this vital issue by taking the question directly to one under-tapped resource – America’s teen girls, ages 13-18. Sponsored by National Engineers Week Foundation, the Global Marathon is the world’s premiere non-profit forum for connecting girls and young women with engineer mentors around the globe. A virtual event taking place today, March 10 and tomorrow, March 11, the Global Marathon features 24 hours of continuous internet chats, telephone conversations and Webcasts from various points on six continents.

The survey, conducted by E-Poll Market Research, found that while 38% of girls plan to pursue a career in the sciences, an almost equal number (39%), feel they are not getting a proper STEM education. Significantly, 75% of girls think they will use math in a future job and 61% thought they would use science in a future job. Yet, many felt that school budget cuts and limited resources are inhibiting their ability to receive a well-rounded science education. Many also specifically called for educators to heighten interest in science by making it ‘more hands on’ and offer ‘more experiments.’ Only 18% of girls agreed strongly that they were being ‘prepared to take on the challenges facing the nation,’ when they compared themselves to their peers in other countries.

The perception of engineering among American teen girls fared worse. Only 8% of girls plan to pursue a career in engineering, largely because they don’t know much about it or don’t understand it. 42% of those surveyed felt it would be ‘very difficult’ to pursue a career in engineering. Many said they thought engineering was boring or too difficult, yet they also said they might consider an engineering career “if I knew more about it.”

“The results of this survey could not be clearer,” said Leslie Collins, executive director, National Engineers Week Foundation. “American girls understand implicitly the importance of STEM education but they are frustrated that they are not being properly prepared to take on the challenges they will face when competing on a global level. When you consider that math and science are simply the tools that engineers use, yet engineering scored much lower in terms of interest and aptitude, it becomes obvious that a lot of this comes down to how these girls perceive themselves and their abilities. It is imperative that we look at how we are educating our next generation of leaders, particularly girls, so that we can empower them and provide them with the tools to succeed.”

E-Poll Market Research sampled 877 respondents, yielding a margin of error of 3.3%. The survey was conducted online from March 4 – March 9, 2010.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Parents of young boys may want to encourage moderation when it comes to their kids' video game habits. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, owning a video-game system may hamper academic development in some children.

Psychological scientists Robert Weis and Brittany C. Cerankosky of Denison University conducted a study examining short-term effects of video-game ownership on academic development in young boys. Families with boys between the ages of 6 to 9 were recruited for this study. The families did not own video-game systems, but the parents had been considering buying one for their kids. The children completed intelligence tests as well as reading and writing assessments. In addition, the boys' parents and teachers filled out questionnaires relating to their behavior at home and at school. Half of the families were selected to receive a video-game system (along with three, age-appropriate video games) immediately, while the remaining families were promised a video-game system four months later, at the end of the experiment. Over the course of the four months, the parents recorded their children's activities from the end of the school day until bedtime. At the four-month time point, the children repeated the reading and writing assessments and parents and teachers again completed the behavioral questionnaires.

The results of this study showed that the boys who received the video-game system immediately spent more time playing video games and less time engaged in after-school academic activities than boys who received the video-game system at the end of the experiment. Furthermore, the boys who received the video-game system at the beginning of the study had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later compared with the boys receiving the video-game system later on. Although there were no differences in parent-reported behavioral problems between the two groups of kids, the boys who received the video-game system immediately had greater teacher-reported learning problems.

Further analysis revealed that the time spent playing video games may link the relationship between owning a video-game system and reading and writing scores. These findings suggest that video games may be displacing after-school academic activities and may impede reading and writing development in young boys. The authors note that when children have problems with language at this young age, they tend to have a tougher time acquiring advanced reading and writing skills later on. They conclude, "Altogether, our findings suggest that video-game ownership may impair academic achievement for some boys in a manner that has real-world significance."

Youth who are threatened with or experience physical violence, or who are injured by peers report more suicidal thoughts and behavior than non-victimized youth, according to a study released in the July 19th online edition of the Journal of Pediatrics. Conducted by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the study documents a significant connection between this type of peer victimization and youth suicide.

Scientists measured physical violence by peers, a form a peer victimization that can occur during bullying and other incidents, and the relationship to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Findings show that youth threatened or injured by a peer were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal thoughts, and 3.3 times more likely to report suicidal behavior than non-victimized peers.

Youth suicide is a serious problem that can have lasting harmful effects on individuals, families, and communities. Investing in programs and policies that reduce peer victimization experiences in schools might have farther-reaching effects on suicidal behavior.

Jennifer Wyatt Kaminski, Xiangming Fang, Victimization by Peers and Adolescent Suicide in Three US Samples, The Journal of Pediatrics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 July 2009, ISSN 0022-3476, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2009.04.061.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

As schools gear up for statewide testing of mathematics skills this spring, some students will be helping to fine-tune a computer-based, emotionally perceptive math tutoring software developed by University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientist Beverly Woolf, Ivon Arroyo and colleagues, which can help certain students improve standardized test scores.

In earlier studies, the software has improved student math test scores by 10 percent, a critical difference for those who are struggling to pass. As Woolf explains, “Our original work was to find out where girls needed extra attention and how to give it to them. According to our studies, the extra support they need compared to boys is more about emotion than information.”

In April, in another round of studies supported by the National Science Foundation, Woolf and colleagues will offer the tutorials to students in study groups of about 100. They’ll be offered either a white, black or Hispanic learning coach by the software to enhance attractiveness. “We want to improve students’ relationship with math early, which can be so important to their career choices. Once you close off math, you close off most of the sciences, as well,” says Woolf. To prevent that, the program virtually assigns an individual aide to each student.

Woolf and Arroyo know from previous work that girls in fifth grade thrive on extra attention, and respond well to supportive characters and positive feedback. So they developed computer-based tutorials that use such techniques. Most recently, they’ve added sensors and cameras so the computer can recognize when students are happy or stressed, fidgeting, frustrated or feeling confident. Guided by such cues, the “learning companion” character reaches out with encouraging words to praise a student’s effort, offer a hint or suggest that trying again is an important aspect of learning.

As the computer scientist explains, “Girls get equally good grades and express interest in math and science at the same level as boys in elementary and middle school, but by the time they get to high school they’re expressing more frustration and dislike of math and they start to do worse on achievement tests. So years ago we began to explore how to keep girls’ interest in math and science alive, and keep their test scores up.”

Interestingly, boys mute or turn off the learning companion character twice as often as girls when working through the mathematics tutorials. “Gender does seem to matter for learning mathematics at this age,” comments Woolf. Girls appreciate the emotional support matching their mood given by the computer software, but it seems less important to boys. “Our position is that everyone can learn, it’s just a matter of how each one learns best. It’s very important in education to find the key to student success,” she adds.

At present, the software is correct about 70 to 80 percent of the time when using its camera to detect when the student user is confident and happy or bored, anxious or frustrated. Other variables that cue the software to a student’s emotional state include the time taken to answer questions; number of hints requested and grip on the mouse. In their current studies, the researchers are searching for the optimum combination of sensors and camera data to best predict a learner’s frame of mind.

To anchor the software in real-world problems, Woolf, Arroyo and colleagues developed several diverse characters in a community called “Wayang Outpost,” based on a real NSF-sponsored team of biologists working in Borneo studying endangered orangutans. Many of the math and geometry problems encountered in the 45-minute tutorials are linked to real problems at Wayang, such as figuring the total area of roofing material needed to build a new jungle research station.

For students threatened by failure on math and geometry tests, the test score improvements achieved by using Wayang Outpost emotion-sensitive tutorials to reinforce lessons in the weeks leading up to achievement tests are extremely valuable, Woolf says.

“Not only do the characters in Wayang Outpost help many students feel better about their math skills, they lead to more time spent on the problems, and more enjoyable time. So they really learn the concepts being presented in each module at their own pace. Our characters are helping groups who need special attention with emotional or cognitive needs to spend that extra time that leads to more complete learning.”

Other groups, such as low achievement and special needs students have also benefited from this software. Special needs students have academic, physical, social or emotional needs and might need a classroom aide, repetition or extra time to learn well.

Monday, March 8, 2010

*Doctors treat millions of children with Ritalin every year to improve their ability to focus on tasks, but scientists now report that Ritalin also directly enhances the speed of learning.

In animal research, the scientists showed for the first time that Ritalin boosts both of these cognitive abilities by increasing the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine deep inside the brain. Neurotransmitters are the chemical messengers neurons use to communicate with each other. They release the molecule, which then docks onto receptors of other neurons. The research demonstrated that one type of dopamine receptor aids the ability to focus, and another type improves the learning itself.

The scientists also established that Ritalin produces these effects by enhancing brain plasticity – strengthening communication between neurons where they meet at the synapse. Research in this field has accelerated as scientists have recognized that our brains can continue to form new connections – remain plastic – throughout life.

"Since we now know that Ritalin improves behavior through two specific types of neurotransmitter receptors, the finding could help in the development of better targeted drugs, with fewer side effects, to increase focus and learning," said Antonello Bonci, MD, principal investigator at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center and professor of neurology at UCSF. The Gallo Center is affiliated with the UCSF Department of Neurology.

Bonci is co-senior author of the paper, which will be published online in "Nature Neuroscience" on Sunday, March 7, 2010.

Bonci and his colleagues showed that Ritalin's therapeutic action takes place in a brain region called the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of neurons known to be critical for learning and emotional memory.

"We found that a dopamine receptor, known as the D2 receptor, controls the ability to stay focused on a task – the well-known benefit of Ritalin," said Patricia Janak, PhD, co-senior author on the paper. "But we also discovered that another dopamine receptor, D1, underlies learning efficiency."

Janak is a principal investigator at the Gallo Center and a UCSF associate professor of neurology. Lead author of the paper is Kay M. Tye, PhD, a postdoctoral scientist at the Gallo Center when the research was carried out.

The research assessed the ability of rats to learn that they could get a sugar water reward when they received a signal – a flash of light and a sound. The scientists compared the behavior of animals receiving Ritalin with those that did not receive it, and found those receiving Ritalin learned much better.

However, they also found that if they blocked the dopamine D1 receptors with drugs, Ritalin was unable to enhance learning. And if they blocked D2 receptors, Ritalin failed to improve focus. The experiments established the distinct role of each of the dopamine receptors in enabling Ritalin to enhance cognitive performance.

In addition, animals that performed better after Ritalin treatment showed enhanced synaptic plasticity in the amygdala. Enhanced plasticity is essentially increased efficiency of neural transmission. The researchers confirmed this by measuring electrical activity in neurons in the amygdala after Ritalin treatment.

The research confirmed that learning and focus were enhanced when Ritalin was administered to animals in doses comparable to those used therapeutically in children.

"Although Ritalin is so frequently prescribed, it induces many brain changes, making it difficult to identify which of those changes improve learning." said Kay Tye. "By identifying the brain mechanisms underlying Ritalin's behavioral enhancements, we can better understand the action of Ritalin as well as the properties governing brain plasticity."

Potential to improve children's diets without burdening school finances while helping local farmers

During the school day, children eat roughly one-third of their nutritional needs while at school. Besides lunch, breakfast and snacks may be served, providing ample opportunities for obesity-prevention strategies by offering more nutritious food. With economical constraints interfering with schools to provide children with increased amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables, a study in the March/April issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior examines how farm-to-school programs have the potential to improve children's diets by providing locally grown produce without burdening the school's finances.

Researchers at the Michigan State University, Lansing, examined why farmers, school food service professionals (SFSP), and food distributors participate in farm-to-school programs and how they characterize the opportunities and challenges to school food procurement from local farmers. Researchers identified three major reasons why SFSP participate in farm-to-school programs including (1) ''The students like it,'' (2) ''The price is right,'' and (3) ''We're helping our local farmer.''

There were three areas that emerged from analysis of the SFSP's interviews about students/children participation in the farm-to-school programs which included: (1) quality, (2) influence of food service staff, and (3) relationships with farmers. The findings were best described by following two SFSP's interviews:

"A lot of our teachers go to apple orchards so it was neat to have them served for lunch [ . . . ] so we had that link, cafeteria, classroom, field trip. I think they might have said something to the kids, and then the kids get a little more attention so they're like huh, maybe I should eat this apple instead of just letting it sit on the tray.''

''The kids just love [farmer]. He's one of the coolest guys in the world. And if we're able to do that, it becomes a cool food and kids like cool foods, you know. They don't want things that aren't cool.''

A "trickle-down effect" was found for SFSP being proud to serve high-quality products that students were excited to eat.

The researchers found the farm-to-school programs benefited both the school and farmer. SFSP reported that the lower price for produce was attributed to a shortened supply chain. SFSP were able to buy produce that is not typically offered in school cafeterias such as asparagus, blue potatoes, Asian pears, etc.

Schools are an attractive market for the farmer because "perfect" products are not always needed. For example, a SFSP commented:

"I will take the outsize apples. [Farmer] will bring me bushels of apples, the tiny ones, and that's great for our kindergarteners, our first-graders. We sort them out and the big ones children here [middle school] love so I think we're a great market for off-size. We don't need the perfect-sized apple. That's great for retail, that's what sells. But in schools, we can take the carrots that have ''s'' [shape] in them because we'll clean them, we'll take the skin off, and then we'll chop them up and it doesn't matter to us. They'll end up in the homemade soup that day, or on top of salad. So for us, we're a good market and I don't think farmers realize that.''

This research is being presented at a time when budgets are tight and there is a huge need for nutrition education in schools. The farm-to-school program may help to promote healthful eating and improve our school food programs.

Writing in the article, the authors state, "Relationships with farmers and vendor characteristics emerged as important variables that may have contributed to the benefits that these food service professionals expressed. This study suggests a relationship between locally grown food and potential benefits such as increased consumption of fruits and vegetables among children. However, much more research is needed to better understand how these and other variables influence children's short and long-term dietary habits so that supportive programs and policies can be developed. This study also emphasizes the need for SFSPs to understand the advantages and disadvantages of buying locally grown food from different intermediaries as well as their own motivations (eg, improving children's fruit and vegetable intake) and interest in local food procurement. More research is needed on how different types of intermediaries influence the benefits attributed to farm-to-school programs. Finally, whether buying locally grown food directly from a farmer or through a food distributor, connecting children and food service staff to the source of their food— where and how it was grown and who grew it—appears to be a key mediator between locally grown fruits and vegetables and children's consumption of these food items. Therefore, as schools increasingly look to distributors for their local food needs, educational materials that retain or create a link from farms to schools will be important."

Educators collect and use data about students, staff, and schools. Some of these data originate in individual student and staff records that are confidential or otherwise sensitive. And even those data that are a matter of public record, such as aggregate school enrollment, need to be accessed, presented, and used in an ethically responsible manner. While laws set the legal parameters that govern data use, ethics establish fundamental principles of "right and wrong" that are critical to the appropriate management and use of education data in the technology age.

This guide reflects the experience and judgment of experienced data managers.

This guide contains:• Canons-core ethical principles• Vignettes--example that illustrates how an ethical canon is relevant to the real world• Discussion--an explanation of the canon that provides context for understanding the ethical principles being addressed• Recommended Practices and Training

*Data from two states demonstrate differing trends in school performance and improvement, Provide insights into ESEA reauthorization and strategies for identifying our nation’s “stuck” schools

A report by The Education Trust shows that schools often lumped together as “low performing” are not all alike. Examining data from reading and mathematics assessments for elementary and middle schools in ten states, the study’s authors found that some low-performing schools remain stuck year after year, and others that started low performing are among the fastest improvers in their states.

“State and local educators and policymakers can apply an analysis like ours right now to better target their interventions. And given the tough budget situation in most states, strategic targeting is more important than ever,” said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy at The Education Trust and coauthor of the report. “But we also hope this paper will help illuminate the conversation about reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This analysis points to a need to look not just at a school’s performance but at its rate of improvement as well.”

The report—the first in a four-part “Stuck Schools Series” that examines school achievement and improvement patterns—explores the data on improvement in initially low-performing schools in two states, Maryland and Indiana. These states were selected as examples because they illustrate quite different improvement patterns that are evident in the eight other states the authors examined. Some of the findings:

• Based on reading-proficiency rates, 267 elementary and middle schools in Maryland started out in the bottom quartile of performance. Tracking these initially low-performing schools over five years, the study found that 64 percent made gains that put them among the top-improving schools in the state, 29 percent made average improvement, and only 7 percent had gains (or declines) that put them among the slowest “improvers” in the state.• Of the 370 elementary and middle schools in Indiana that started out low performing in reading, 38 percent were high improving, 24 percent were average improving, and 38 percent were low improving.• But while Maryland schools overall—not just the low-performing schools—showed large gains over the period studied, achievement among all types of schools in Indiana was fairly stagnant. Thus “big gains” in the two states are of very different magnitudes: To be a top gainer in Maryland, a school had to improve by more than 15 percentage points over five years; in Indiana, improvement of more than four percentage points put a school in this category.

“We need to understand what’s happening in the big gainers and scale up the practices that lead to meaningful improvement for all students,” said Hall. “That said, the stuck schools require immediate attention to ensure that their students get a fair shot at a strong education. The need to attend to both types of schools is urgent, but they have quite different needs. And policymakers at every level need to recognize those differences.”

The report cautions against policies that reward any and all gains among low-performing schools. “Some schools are making slightly higher than average gains but are still stuck among the lowest performers,” said Natasha Ushomirsky, K-12 data analyst at The Education Trust and coauthor of the report. “Put simply, while all improvement is good, some improvement is just not good enough when you start as far back as many of these schools.”

Education Trust leaders believe the report can help inform how the U.S. Department of Education crafts and implements programs to assist struggling schools. “Like status measures alone, improvement alone provides an incomplete measure of what’s really happening within a school. Pairing them provides a richer, more accurate, and ultimately more useful picture,” said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust.

The schools identified as “stuck” in the study don’t neatly match those identified for school improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Part of the reason is that the law classifies schools that may be higher performing but where some groups of students are lagging behind. In addition, some states have found ways to let even their lowest performers off the hook.

“The point here is that we shouldn’t be looking at the data in just one way,” said Haycock. “In the short term, this analysis can help state and local policymakers make smarter investments in school improvement. In the long run, it can help improve federal policy. Both will help make schools better for kids—and that, in the end, is what we are all after, right?”

The second paper in the “Stuck Schools Series” will look beyond overall test scores and consider the performance of subgroups of students. The third will explore what the data say about performance and improvement trends across districts. And the fourth will address the public-policy implications of the findings.

New York City’s public high school system — the nation’s largest — underwent a sweeping transformation during the first decade of the twenty-first century. At the start of the decade, students were routinely assigned to their zoned high schools, which often had thousands of students and were overcrowded and low-performing. By the 2007-2008 school year, some 23 large and midsize schools with graduation rates below 45 percent were closed or on their way to closing. Simultaneously, many new schools that were intended to serve high school-age students came into being, including almost 200 new small schools.

In a break with past practices, the majority of the new small schools accepted students at all levels of academic proficiency and thus were open to those who would likely have attended the closed schools. While the new small schools have various themes and educational philosophies, they share three objectives: to prepare their students for college; to ensure strong student-teacher relationships; and to combine learning with real-world examples both inside and outside the classroom.

Concurrent with these changes in the supply of high schools, the City created a new system by which students exercised demand for them: school choice was extended to all incoming high school students in New York City — compelling rising ninth-graders to indicate up to 12 schools that they wanted to attend. A computerized process was then used to assign each student to his or her highest-ranked school with space available. While the introduction of choice affected all public high school students, most of the school closings and openings were concentrated in low-income, nonwhite areas of the Bronx and Brooklyn.

The scale and rapidity of the changes were grounded in the conviction of the New York City Department of Education, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other key local stakeholders that small schools could more effectively meet the academic and socioemotional needs of disadvantaged students. With funding from the Gates Foundation, three reports are being released on the implementation of the City’s small school reforms.

This report, from MDRC, takes a broad view, looking at the ways in which New York City’s reform effort transformed the public high school landscape from 2002 to 2008 and describing the characteristics of the schools and students involved. It finds, among other things, that, by September 2007, the new small schools collectively served almost as many students as the closing schools had served in September 2002. And the students at the small, nonselective high schools across the five boroughs of New York City tend to be more disadvantaged than students attending other kinds of schools.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Children taught skills to monitor and control their anger and other emotions improved their classroom behavior and had significantly fewer school disciplinary referrals and suspensions, according to a study by University of Rochester Medical Center researchers.

Children in a school-based mentoring program were about half as likely to have any discipline incident over the three-month period of the study, according to an article published online by the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. They also had a 43 percent decrease in mean suspensions as compared to the control group, which did not receive mentoring of the self-control skills. In the four-month interval after the intervention began, 1.8 percent of children in the mentored group were suspended compared to 6.1 percent of the control group. Children taught the new skills also had a 46 percent decrease in mean office disciplinary referrals as compared to the children in the study’s control group

“It is exciting that adult mentors, who are not mental health professionals, taught children a set of skills that significantly strengthened the children’s ability to function well in their classrooms and meet school expectations,” said Peter Wyman, Ph.D., lead author of the article and associate professor of Psychiatry at the Medical Center. “This study suggests that with appropriate guidance from a trained adult, young children are capable of learning a great deal about their emotions and skills for handling their emotions effectively and those skills can have direct, positive benefits for their functioning in school.”

The study evaluated the effectiveness of the Rochester Resilience Project that was developed by Wyman and Wendi Cross, Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the Medical Center, to address the needs of young children with emerging behavioral and social-emotional problems by providing an accessible school-based intervention. In a relationship with an intervention mentor over four months, children learn and practice behavioral and cognitive skills designed to strengthen their self-regulation of emotions and address specific goals to improve school adaptation.

“Our goal in developing the Rochester Resilience Project was to ‘translate’ findings from research about how children learn skills to be more resilient in relationships with adults into an accessible program in schools,” Wyman said. “Being a successful student in elementary school classrooms establishes a foundation that makes healthy development more likely in the future.”

Activities establish the Resilience Project mentor as an empathic adult informed about each child’s life context, strengths and challenges. Through adult-led interactive learning and practice in natural settings, children are taught to monitor their own emotions and the emotion of others, using cues to identify feelings and intensities of feelings. Mentors introduce ‘feelings check-in’ as a standard practice that serves as a teaching tool about feelings and a transition to skills focused on managing feelings.

Self-control and reducing escalation of emotions is taught through the concept of a “feelings thermometer” to depict intensity. Children learn to use “mental muscles” as a tool to monitor feelings and to stop feelings from entering a hot zone. They also learn to maintain control and regain equilibrium through strategies such as taking a deep-breath, stepping back from emotionally intense situations, and using an imaginary umbrella as protection from hurtful words.

For each of the 14 weekly lessons, children met individually with their mentors for approximately 25 minutes in a private setting during the school day. The skills taught to children are labeled in simple terms suited to developmental level. Reinforcement and feedback from mentors in settings in which children use new skills is also critical for children to successfully acquire the skills. Mentors collaborated with teachers to identify classroom situations in which the mentors could provide reminders to children to use new skills, and cues were provided, a sticker or button, for example, for the child to take as a reminder.

In the study, 226 children from kindergarten up to third grade in two urban elementary schools took part. They had manifested emerging behavioral, social-emotional, and/or on-task learning problems at school. This population was selected due to evidence that those problems increase the likelihood that children will be less successful at school and may develop behavioral problems, such as substance abuse.

Children who received the intervention showed improved functioning in all domains of classroom behavior rated by teachers. The intervention had a positive impact on children’s classroom behaviors and rates of disciplinary incidents, including fewer aggressive or disruptive problems, improved on-task learning behaviors and peer social skills, and less shy-withdrawn and more assertive behaviors, the researchers concluded. After the study was completed, children in the control group also were mentored and taught the self-control skills.

The mentoring improved peer social skills for girls but not for boys.

“We found that girls benefited more than boys in terms of improved peer social skills, and the reasons are unknown,” the researchers state. “We note that all mentors were female. It is possible that congruence of child-mentor pairs on sex and other characteristics may influence the extent to which children perceive mentors as valid models for assisting them with social skills.”

This study demonstrates the potential for the Rochester Resilience Project model to reach large numbers of low-income minority children who have limited access to mental health services, the researchers concluded.